Imprint&reality
by impampersand
Summary: "Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you." The drift touches not just its Rangers but also the Jaegers that they pilot.
1. PPDC Jaeger Crew's Creed

**Pan Pacific Defense Corps Jaeger Crew's Creed,_ as derived from the United States Marine Corps Rifleman's Creed_**

This is my Jaeger. There are many like it, but this one is mine. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me, my Jaeger is useless. Without my Jaeger, I am useless. I must guide my Jaeger true. I must fight better than the enemy who is trying to kill me. I must kill them before they kill me. I will. My Jaeger and I know what counts in war is not the weapons we discharge, the noise of our burst, or the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit.

My Jaeger is human, even as I am human, because it is my life. Thus I will learn it as a sibling. I will learn its weaknesses, its strengths, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my Jaeger clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other.

Before this world I swear this creed. My Jaeger and I are the defenders of our world. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life. So be it, until the victory is ours' and there is no enemy.


	2. Brawler Yukon

**Brawler Yukon**

It's something Caitlin Lightcap hears about because she's a pilot, not just a scientist now. Pilots-Rangers-have their own traditions and language, 'ghost drifting' and 'drift hangovers' and the like.

If she had more time, perhaps Caitlin would have considered the neural imprint of one pilot's mind against the other, the interconnections, the technology that allows each neural handshake to be initiated and maintained as long as necessary.

Maybe that's why every jaeger has its own distinct name, no part recycled.

But, well. As every pilot of a Mark-1 learns: if it is not the kaiju or the neural load that kills you, there's a fair chance that the radiation will. Caitlin and Sergio live to build the Wei triplet's drift interface but not much longer.

Later, the remains of Brawler Yukon are incorporated into Cherno Alpha in the last days of the war. The technicians offer the transplanted parts prayers to uncounted deities in the many tongues of the Pacific.


	3. Lady Danger, before

**Lady Danger, before**

It's a small detail, but each Jaeger's AI has a different voice. The request the Becket boys make is that it be their sister's voice in their ears. Jaz isn't following them into Shatterdome; she's too young for now. She stays with Uncle Charles in Anchorage.

There are many ways to save the world: Yancy and Raleigh will face the Kaiju head-on and Jazmine will clean up the mess. Families work together.

Three years after Trespasser attacks San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakland and the spaces between, Yancy and Raleigh enroll in the PPDC Jaeger Academy expecting to wash out. (Monique is dead (cancer-from the cigarettes she refused to give up, even on the day that she died) and Richard scarpered off afterwards. Only the little Beckets and Uncle Charles remain.)

The brothers Becket are 21 and 18 when they graduate and are assigned to their Lady Danger (there is another name, but the Beckets refuse to use the slur they saw flung about during their travels); Jaz is 17 and enrolling at University of Alaska at Anchorage. She visits them before their birthdays before she has to go to class.

The Beckets haven't seen each other much since training began at the Academy and Jaz enjoys the brief insight she has into the heart of a Shatterdome and agrees to be the voice in her brothers' ears. (Jaz laughs herself breathless when she finds 'Plasma Cannon engaged.' Raleigh and Yancy can't help but join in, laughing until they cry. It is a good day.)

Jaz goes to university afterwards and dives into her studies. UA-Anchorage is right on the coast and its environmental studies program is evolving constantly with the the spread and spill of Kaiju Blue. The Kaiju are still coming.

That year, Yamarashi crosses the Breach and makes for Los Angeles. Jaz's classmates cover for her when Horizon Brave's weaponry is ineffective and Lady Danger has to step in. (Her classmates watch her curse and cry in the handful of languages that Dominique Lapierre-Becket taught her children when she was their mother and not a name on a gravestone and heavy in memory.

Jaz watches Yamarashi's beheading and the subsequent rush back to the LA Shatterdome-she knows what Kaiju Blue can do, _she knows_-and Lady Danger's Conn-Pod remains unbreached, barely. Jazmine Becket cries in relief.

It's an hours-long waking nightmare and Jaz's friend stays with her, makes sure the live feed remains open. Even when it's over Jaz can't stop shaking because she isn't going to wake up and run to Raleigh and Yancy's room, crawl in with still-awake Yancy or rousable Raleigh, crawl in with her brother to safety.)

Yamarashi is Lady Danger's first drop, but not their first drift. The Becket boys first spar together and drift together and with their Jaeger; eventually familiarity and Jaz's filtered voice seem to draw Lady Danger into the ghostdrift with them.

_Our girl,_ they think, the way they recognize Jaz and the crew as family. The essence of _YancyRaleighDanger_ spreads between them, shapes and reshapes each of them until they're all a little bit more alike and their Lady is a ghost in the machinery, something more than the infinitesimal lines of code that constructs her movements and processes.

Some days the drift hangover is worse than usual and Beckets and Jaeger twitch in unison. The crew and J Tech Officer Choi smile to themselves at the sight.

February 29, 2020 (_29 Feb 2020,_ Jaz's Brit professor whispers in her ear) is a countdown none of them thinks to know. K Science-still in the days of glory and funding-cannot yet grasp the Breach's capacity to dilate nor frequency of Kaiju event. (A month before the beginning of the end, trace amounts of Kaiju blue seep corrosive through Jazmine Becket's biohazard suit as she attends an off-site environmental clean-up lab.

She will die before her finals; neither of her brothers know that she is ill, nor will she until it is too, too late. Hers is another death tallied, regretfully, mournfully off to the Kaiju. Yancy's memory and Jaz's ashes share a headstone; their brother will not see the grave before the ground softens with spring, trapped in unconsciousness. Then he too is gone, disappearing from the Shatterdome to do what he can still do for humanity, half himself and half a ghost and entirely filled with sharp edges unsoftened by the constant bleed of pain.)

As with the Drift and before the Drift, the Beckets regard and disregard their order in seconds: here are twelve lives that they will not abandon. Their Lady hums understandingly at the edges of their overlapped minds and they move fluid together, all 1,980 tons of them.

Lift, cradle, lock inertia. _YancyRaleigh_ reach out for the ship and their Lady moves with them, obeys the impulses that race from their synapses to her circuits.

Combat is combat, and the plasma cannon discharges pulses into Knifehead. _'Victory,'_ they think smugly, proudly, as their CO reprimands them. Combat is combat, even when the kaiju tears into their shoulder and they lose an arm, _RaleighDanger_ screaming together. Then the ConnPod tears open and-

_'-It tore through the hull-Raleigh listen to me, you need to-'_

-white noise, ringing in their heads and the empty spaces and sparks and emptiness and pain and screaming against it all and-

_'Loading, loading.'_

The plasma cannon discharges. Kaiju signature eradicated.

An endless repeat of white noise echoes between them, _-RaleighDanger, 'I can't, I can't, I can't_' and she cradles him, maintains the forward momentum because he can't, they can't. Ocean waves crash against her legs (their legs) until they don't.

_'Yance.'_

They fall.

She is caught for so very long in Alaska's snow, bleeding sparks and half of her heart into the frigid open air._ 'Yancy,'_ they say together._ 'Yancy.'_

She has carried him for so long, so far, that when they crumble her parts scatter and shatter along the frozen shore. They gather her pieces up and lay them down in the shadows of San Francisco, where the environment remains incompatible with human life. What does it matter for a graveyard to be set into the epicenter of a large-scale nuclear and biohazardous event when the remains oxidize slowly and are themselves radioactive at heart?

There are few visitors to the graveyard, not even thrill-seekers; the environment is too toxic. Then they come and carry her away, and she wonders: what use do they have for scraps with functional mechanisms and heart absent to wander the Pacific coastline?

They piece her slowly together from other skeletons, and oh, her heart it bleeds as they pry open her thorax, it aches and it tastes the open air after so long. What has been allowed to oxidize is repaired or replaced before they consider the mechanics of her heart and the bulk of her size.

It takes a very long time.

Here is one of the questions Ranger Mori murmurs into the Lady's breastplate before she spreads it open: do Jaegers feel pain? Is it the disrupted signal from proprioceptors that indicate_ something is wrong where is the signal_ feeding into pilots whose brains translate that signal into physiological and neural response? Or is it wiring human brains into machines, so that the Jaeger learns agony in transcripted sensory dysfunction, translated into something chemoreceptors and mechanoreceptors and nociceptors can comprehend to feed back through circuits?

She waits and is repaired. Somewhere distant, what remains of her heart is repairing his own.

There is space next to the reactor for their broken bits and another's. The Lady watches the crew piecing what she cannot repair internally. She tastes the cold of Alaska's air from his memories, tastes the ozone and bleeding sparks. She waits.

_All systems operational. Initiating launch operations, Lady Danger._


End file.
